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Ride Availability 2018

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Rob

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I started a similar thread to this in June of last year, however with how the season has started this year I feel the need to begin one much earlier.

As it stands at 11.15am, when all rides in the theme park are scheduled to be open; Wicker Man, Nemesis, Galactica and Rita are all down. The Skyride has been down all season and I am unsure as to whether or not it is open today.

Ride availability was a problem in 2017 and it does not seem to be something that's been sorted for 2018. I suppose the limited resource available is more stretched because of ongoing problems with Wicker Man, but that is not a valid excuse.

I used to mock Thorpe Park for thier abysmal ride availability. Alton Towers always used to be a market leader in this regard. Things have got worse and show no sign of improving; this is something that directly impacts on guest satisfaction as well.

I am aware that Galactica seems to have opened whilst I was writing this post!

:)
 
I think that if you are going to implement staggard opening times, the least Towers could do, is ensure that all the rides are up and running on time and keep any down time to an absolute minimum.

The Towers blamed the weather for the lack of ride availability/late ride opening at the start of the season. The continuation of the lack of ride availability/late ride opening (which has been every single day so far) means the bad weather was just a convenience excuse for them, but in reality showing the incompetence of the park failing to run what is suppose to be the UK number 1 Theme park.

To really sum it all up, at the current moment visiting Alton for supposedly a full day out riding thrill rides is just a complete big Rip off and Merlin knows this
 
The Towers blamed the weather for the lack of ride availability/late ride opening at the start of the season. The continuation of the lack of ride availability/late ride opening (which has been every single day so far) means the bad weather was just a convenience excuse for them, but in reality showing the incompetence of the park failing to run what is suppose to be the UK number 1 Theme park.

The weather was a genuine factor for the first 3 days of the season; I have no problems with ride availability over these days.

However it has not been good enough since.

:)
 
The weather was a genuine factor for the first 3 days of the season; I have no problems with ride availability over these days.

However it has not been good enough since.

:)

I fully hear and agree with what you are saying, the weather couldn't be helped and did play a genuine factor in the fact the the rides remained shut over the first 3 days, but a week and a half down the line, by what I've seen and witness, I'm also convinced that if the opening weekend was glorious sunshine with great temperatures and no winds, the ride availability and service (especially during the morning) would have still been dire

:)
 
Just out of closed season and one of Nemesis trains supposedly still in bits in the maintenance barn. No excuse.

I'll excuse wickerman as it's new and will have teething problems but they shouldn't have chosen it for an ERT coaster.

Breakdowns will happen like any other park but the constant breakdowns at towers stink of budget cuts. The over cautious ops after the smiler incident will play a part too I guess.

Last year opening day was a disaster with almost everything down and weather was not a factor. Galactica was down for weeks, smiler had a prolonged downtime period too last season.
 
Just out of closed season and one of Nemesis trains supposedly still in bits in the maintenance barn. No excuse.

I'll excuse wickerman as it's new and will have teething problems but they shouldn't have chosen it for an ERT coaster.

Breakdowns will happen like any other park but the constant breakdowns at towers stink of budget cuts. The over cautious ops after the smiler incident will play a part too I guess.

Last year opening day was a disaster with almost everything down and weather was not a factor. Galactica was down for weeks, smiler had a prolonged downtime period too last season.

Regarding Nemesis, I'm more concerned about why it has been down all day today than one train not being ready. Nemesis is probably the most reliable coaster on park, it is extremely rar for it to be out of action for a whole day.

They have only just received parts from B&M for the second Nemesis train. I'm unsure as to whether they've only recently discovered that they needed new parts, whether there was a delay from B&M's side or if it's simply something that has taken longer than planned due to cuts.

I think post-Smiler rides do break down more 'easily' as it were, and procedures for getting them up and running again are longer. So that does not help matters. But is says a lot that compared to a few years ago, Towers are now struggling to get less rides open than they used to have for the less time that the park is actually open. I'd love to see the breakdown of cuts to technical services.

:)
 
It seems a very poor start to the season. I was there on Sunday and from what I saw apart from all the breakdowns was minimum trains running on tracks. Nemesis only had 1 running, spinball only had 3 cars until they put a fourth on at about 1330. Can't comment on the others as didn't get that far. There was certainly a lot of unhappy people at the end of the day in the monorail queue.
 
Perhaps nemesis is getting its second train up and running ready for what they're probably expecting to be another busy weekend? That would explain why its been closed all day?

who knows with towerso_O
 
I think they had to make The Wicker Man a ride on the ert due to it's placement on the park. Otherwise people coming into the park at 10am would likely be greeted by the large majority of ert guests already in the queue waiting for it to open.
 
We joined the queue at 14:05 for Wickerman and are only now in the room before preshow.

As far as I know there has only been 2 trains of people run so far today.
 
I was there for opening day, i can't blame the park for the weather. Went back on the Tuesday afterwards. Took a while to get the rides going, there was still snow on the ground. But everything, apart from Hex, Skyride and the Rapids were working by about lunchtime, Park was quiet but i got on all the coasters, even Wickerman which soft opened for the last couple of hours.

Things seemed to running ok on that day, so i'm at a loss to explain why they seem worse a week later.
 
Imagine turning up to a park to find the best two coaters closed!

This happened today. Best I could do was watch Nemesis go round and round. Luckily managed to get on Wickerman though, kind of pot luck joining the queue outside the queue.

Even oblivion went down when I was in the queue, availability is going to kill them if this keeps up along with the staggered ride times. Smiler seems to run OK but it doesn't do it for me, it's nice to look at but not a ride I can do more than once, twice at a push, whereas Nemesis et al the like I could ride all day.
 
I went Monday and what really annoys me is the ride time app, it was showing spin ball as open from the off but did not actually open till 12 ish, went to RMT 10 mins before 11 to queue at 11 ride shows as open with 0 min queue but where told by 11.10 the ride would be at least another 45 mins to open, rapids also showed as open but never did all day never even had water running through it but still showed as available then made way to 13 which again was showing as available but told it was due to open soon so basically got on park and had a two hour walk following a app that showed rides as available and weren’t, we have one child just over 1.2 and one just under 1.2 so we been on park since 9.30 and only done heave o and barrels in 2.5 hours CCl was are next stop if that opened at 10 it would of helped but by time we walked to rmt then to 13 then to close it was gone 12 and was nearly 1 before we got on a coaster believe me when you have younger children that’s a long time for them!!!
 
Haven't Merlin stopped selling sugar drinks and all manner of other stuff to jump on the must keep the plebs fit bandwagon? Maybe that's Alton contribution, set everything as 0 queue time randomly so to send you on a ride quest mega walk around the park to keep fit and make sure you do those whatever 5000 steps a day or whatever (proven) crap it is?

I got it, that's why the Skyride is closed, it's nothing to do with it being broken or to save money, they want you to walk round the park and get fit, thats Merlin's contribution to building a fit society.
 
Ride availability has been very poor this year. The more people that complain to Alton/Merlin via email, facebook, twitter, TripAdvisor etc.. the better.

People say vote with your feet and not to pay anymore money to Merlin, well you only need to take a look at Photobucket, when they started charging for linking your pics to forums, they lost loads of customers, but yet they also took on loads of new customers willing to pay the £300+ service to use their photo hosting site, so it was a win win for Photobucket. At the end of the day, Merlin has us all bent over a barrel.
 
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